Ever since WordPress 2.5 added native tag­ging sup­port, I’ve been going through my old entries and appro­pri­ately tag­ging each one. Recently, I arrived at the chunk of time where I started dat­ing Louise.

It’s said that every­one has at least one rela­tion­ship where you look back and ask your­self, “What the hell was I think­ing?”. I never believed it until, four years later, I came across those old posts. The words were a stark reminder of how hard I tried to make it work, of how much I did for her, and how it was never good enough.

She would belit­tle my attempts to grow and improve, push me to the lim­its of my tol­er­ance, and when I would speak up about how much it hurt me, she would jus­tify it in say­ing that she would refuse to hide her opin­ions because cou­ples should be “open”. I kept get­ting put down, over and over again.

There’s one cor­re­spon­dence in par­tic­u­lar on her blog that I saved, some­thing that typ­i­fies the rela­tion­ship in a few para­graphs, that I read when­ever I need a smile:

is there really such thing as ran­dom, when it comes to people?

seems like in one way or another, i end up dat­ing the same kind of guy.

why is it that i find con­fi­dence so sexy and yet i date peo­ple with very lit­tle of it? Why do i keep find­ing myself with peo­ple with more inse­cu­ri­ties then me? is that a safety net? i hope the fuck not.

I’d like to think that i dont have all that many inse­cu­ri­ties.. but you know.. when i’m with some­one who is very crit­i­cal of them­selves, i can only imag­ine what they think of me. no more shop­ping with oth­ers, it makes me feel unattractive.

and… out­side of that sit­u­a­tion.. i know im attrac­tive… i just dont con­form to what “soci­ety” believes is attractive.

I replied:

You hurt me so much when you say these things. Things such as com­par­ing me to your ex’s, when they are your ex’s for a rea­son. This cer­tainly does not make me feel more con­fi­dent. I admit that I’m inse­cure; it’s some­thing that I’ve been deal­ing with for most of my life, and some­thing that I plan on work­ing on for the rest of it. I was hop­ing that you could accept this as part of me and deal with it until I’m ready, because I’m mak­ing a con­scious effort to improve. Your words are nei­ther nice or encour­ag­ing, and they show me that you’re hav­ing a hard time deal­ing with my cur­rent inabilities.

I’ve asked you not to do this before, and this is the last time that I’m going to ask you not to do it again. If you come to the con­clu­sion that there are no ran­dom peo­ple and that you just keep dat­ing the same types of guys, then we have a problem.

And her response:

warn­ing!!!!!!!

This weblog is writ­ten with­out appolo­gies. I say what i feel here because if i dont, i tend to say them out loud.

For those who dont like it, just dont visit this site… i’ll cre­ate a fluffy place where noth­ing but good thoughts are recorded and you can live in bliss, think­ing that you are the only per­son in the world who has thoughts they cant SAY to some­one else.

rant over, fuck off.

And I smile because it’s a reminder of how much bet­ter it is now that I’m out of that toxic rela­tion­ship. Of how I unar­guably made the right deci­sion. My calm, rea­son­able response, met with her lash­ing out as if it was my fault. Even now, I can’t believe I was strong enough to put up with all her bull­shit and bear the brunt of both our inse­cu­ri­ties, to the point where I would phys­i­cally abuse myself.

Once, she even had the audac­ity to leave a spite­ful com­ment on one of my hon­est entries, after what she wrote above.

I remem­ber being on the bus the day I decided to break up with her. It took longer than it should have because I was always clouded by fatigue. I adjusted my sleep­ing sched­ule to hers, but she got to sleep in because of the nature of her job. The day I finally got a decent night’s sleep was the day I fig­ured out that it wasn’t worth it. Even John, who con­tra­dicts every­thing I say as both lawyer and con­sigliere, agreed that there was no hope with her.

Afterward, she saw every­thing so dif­fer­ently from the way it hap­pened, as if I was at fault, when it was the one rela­tion­ship which I feel con­fi­dent in say­ing that I gave her every­thing and did noth­ing wrong. I always sus­pected it was some kind of defence-mechanism, where her mind wouldn’t let her objec­tively, con­sciously see any of her issues or mistakes.

So it had to end, for the sake of my san­ity and my self-respect.

Sometimes, you sit back and real­ize, “I deserve so much bet­ter than this”.